Living in the Magical Mode: Notes from the Book of Minutes of a Guild of Shy Sorcerers
REVIEWS and REACTIONS
Return to the main book pageResponse by Professor Patricia MacCormack
This book (I cannot say 'Smith's book' as this is a vivid example of outerwordly voices of multiplicity and polyvocality) quivers with a mysterious and seductive series of experiments in form, expression and light and dark play. The book transgresses modes of writing, recording, and sensorially experiencing through words, the world of which humans have too long claimed exhaustive knowledge. Making the world strange, or, rather, elucidating the inherent strangeness of the world through the lens of occult aesthetics and ideas, the book itself is a strange experience in reading and feeling. There is a sense of collectivity, an ecology of authors, human, alien, animal, vegetal, obscure, that gives the book an ethical aspect which makes a sophisticated addition to contemporary occult ways of writing and thinking. Patricia MacCormack is Professor of Continental Philosophy, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge and author of The Ahuman Manifesto Review by Nigel Adams, author of Disposable Shaman:
"...it wasn't an easy read but I continued to the end. It was dislocating at times and at others compelling and dramatic. I had the feeling all the way through that it definitely meant something but that meaning was either just out of reach or when I thought I had grasped an aspect it shapeshifted and slipped away again. Not so much a story as an experience of something difficult to describe and definitely alive..." Response by Bianca Mastrominico (co-director of Organic Theatre):
“Your book arrived today and I started reading it and telling John about assemblage and how to me it seems that you are bringing mythogeography from physical to mental spaces, and scrolling the pages very quickly is like walking through writing, and streams of consciousness evoking multiple readings of constructed realities. It is subtle and immaterial in scope as much as it is still a physical book! These are just my first impressions and I look forward to finding out more..." Response by Tracy Fahey
A new Phil Smith book, is more than a book, it is a journey. A complicated journey at that; no straightforward route for Smith, king of mythogeography, expert at walking sideways, embracer of tangents. Living In The Magical Mode is no exception. A peculiar blend of magic, this book, as exemplified in the introductory explanation – Notes from the Book of Minutes of a Guild of Shy Sorcerers on sacred space, place and time, non-systems magic, psychic war, conspiracies, somatics, ghosts, paganism, conjuring Planet B, the third hauntology, jellyfish, apocalypse, what the horses mean and the transformation of certain readers moving from fiction to fictioning. Smith, here the self-styled editor of these notes given to him by a mysterious old man, offers us the tantalisingly Gothic notion of the ‘found manuscript’, as minutes of a reading group that has self-destructed. The notes themselves are overwritten, contradicted, the work of numerous members, a multitude of dissident voices. Reminiscent in form of Mark Z. Danielewski's annotated House of Leaves (2000), Living In The Magical Mode offers a new point of departure into the fallow cultural geography of the English wyrd. Maddening, recursive, compelling, the conversations in this book range from religion to hauntology to older, darker rituals. Tracy Fahey, Author and Head of Dept of Fine Art & Education at Limerick School of Art & Design www.tracyfahey.com Response by Alkistis Dimech
Reading Living in the Magical Mode one can feel the sheer joy and exuberance of discovery welling up, as the vertiginous possibility of magical adventure opens before the book club members. A psychogeographic and haunted field report, part Borges, part K-Punk and all wild text, it comes highly recommended for all those embarking, engaged or teetering on the edge of the great and terrible adventure of magical living. Alkistis Dimech, artist, dancer and choreographer |
Review by Julian Vayne, author of The Fool & The Mirror:
“It's an interesting bricolage of influences and voices and I'm sure that, especially for those engaged with hauntological themes, it will have a definite resonance. I hope that Living in the Magical Mode inspires readers to explore the interface of the esoteric, literary and psychogeographical worlds for themselves”. Review by John Bowers, musician, writer and film-maker:
“It's a great book. Really enjoyed it. Lots to think about. Many things expressed well in there that have always bugged me. "As above, so below". "You mean there's no wiggle room?" I ask. Many suggestions for strategies and tactics. I really appreciated the multiple voices as this was right for dealing with ambivalent affairs.” Review by Pete Golding, former head of Sociology at City College, Plymouth:
“I have never read anything quite like it but like it I did. No plot. No characters. Multiple narrators and perspectives. No discernible location. Instead it ranged from the familiar to the exotic. It was historical and ahistorical. Scientific and mythic. In parts it was like reading an academic essay with quotes and a bib. In other parts it was like a journal, with scribbles and drawings. In other parts it was lyrical and poetic. I have to say it wasn't easy to read but it was well paced so it's internal momentum drew me along to the end. And in all honesty made me feel like I haven't read enough to vie at this level. Someone somewhere is going to declare this a masterpiece but I don't feel qualified to do so. To cite some psycho-babble I'm still trying to process all of it. However it is a truly remarkable composition unique in its aim and execution and something for which you should be justly proud, jubilant even. And don't let anything I say put you off but keep going and don't look back. As Schopenhauer said, talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.” Review by Robert Pacitti
‘If you really want to live in a magical mode, then don’t you need to know what kind of mode we are living in right now and how you can change it from this mode to a magical one?’ Living in the Magical Mode edited by Phil Smith introduces us to multiple unknown voices, who together form the membership of a small book club, turned magical sleuth outfit. A well-read, smart and politicised bunch, they are fiercely skeptical of doctrine, open to divergent ways of being in the world, yet still occasionally appear to perhaps belong to a committee presided over by the Vicar of Dibley. Such are the surprising contradictions of Smith’s excellent book. The found minutes of this group are the text through which we are having a good nose, and this device affords Smith a fluid structure to present a plurality of views, which the author clearly feels no sense of obligation to resolve. This in itself makes for joyful reading. Grand statements are shared only to then be undercut, contradictions are posed, quips are made, and direct challenges to what’s just been read whilst sometimes profound, are also sometimes laugh out loud funny. But don’t be fooled, this is a very serious and intentional magical book. Perhaps one even listening in as you read, eavesdropping on the associations you form in order to then speak back. Here Smith achieves the uncanny, through the smart layering and crafting of space between voices. Whilst packed full of rich content, Living in the Magical Mode also skilfully operates in the blanks and pauses between statements or ideas. This negative space requires us to forge bridges, construct our own questions, even relish moments of confusion. And it is here where the true magic of this book can also be found. As Smith writes: ‘Art is representing, magic is matter, magic is the work.' Living in the Magical Mode tells us that Ekkehard Heironimus once wrote, ‘intellectuals have been rather like a film of oil on a great puddle of water; it shines mischievously and thinks that it is the whole thing, but it is only one molecule thick.’ This book invites you into the waters below, down past academia and theory into the real depths of intuition, common sense, myth and lived experience. There are a number of references early on in the book to things being upside down - a yew tree, Box Hill, someone buried head first - but of course these will only be perceived as inverted if your starting point is upright. A contributor to the book club minutes muses, ‘Seems like there’s an easy way we can do magic which is to learn a code, buy the robes, sit the exams, achieve the levels, enter the elite. Or we can refuse and find our own way in the gutter.’ And this is indeed a handbook of sorts on how to live a covert magical life and pass in broad daylight, or the dead of night. We learn to speak in tongues into a mobile phone on a busy high street to blend in, and about ‘the real world of the unreal world’. A place of enchantment where we share a rejection of doctrine and a suspicion of those who organise others for religious or political ends. Smith is by turns subtle about this: ‘There’s a web, we pulled on one of its threads, it pulled back.’ And direct: ‘Well, I am already here. At the same time we are always somewhere else.’ Living in the Magical Mode locates itself within a European history of global power dynamics. Well researched references to Ancient Greece, Rome and the former USSR are startling in the ways their impact on contemporary geopolitical and magical concerns are interwoven. This is evidenced neatly through an exploration of ‘cultural monsters’ deployed as a method of dodging shared responsibility for the past, ‘Disappearing into fictions has already left us as shells through which the ancient things have returned.’ Living in the Magical Mode also pushes at the evolution of Western occult traditions. Smith writes, ‘Reducing the world to a handful of universals is really not a good move in evolutionary or magical terms.’ And there is a sharp dismantling of the current fad for ‘folk horror’ which had me shouting, ‘yes!’ out loud. Of the many challenging tasks this formidable writer has set themselves, one is surely how to signpost that which isn’t visible. Yet this is undertaken with such skilful dexterity that Smith not only writes meaningfully about that which cannot be seen, but also offers archeological analysis of the invisible and the magical. As the book itself tells us, this is writing as, ‘ambience rather than narrative.’ Enchantment applies pressure to each page like weather - discernible, sometimes nondescript, prone to sudden change, but impacting on us directly whether we are aware of it or not. As the author posits, ‘If the news was drawn in chalk on walls and pavements, imagine how rainfall could change everything.’ We are also invited to reflect then on how magic can too. As Smith writes: ‘When things start to get magical, they start to get nasty.’ This timely book has a huge amount to offer on how we might operate and survive in our increasingly anodyne world. We are told in no uncertain terms that, ‘There are not enough sleazy back rooms for magic to thrive.’ Unless of course we create them. A kitten practising innately to kill a ball of fluffy yarn couldn’t create a more adorable knot of ideas or proposals for our contemporary magical realm.
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Reviewed in Northern Earth Issue 171, March 2023
"This is something of an oddity, spinning out of Phil Smith’s cultural history of drama, walking, occult reading and the approach he has coined in his book Mythogeography. Imagine a book club, when “some idiot suggested we read The Great God Pan … Now we’re caught up in a never-ending backstory of haunted cultural studies”, and the club gets renamed as The Guild of Shy Sorcerers. The book follows their communication in a chatgroup, as they toss around assumptions of the eerie, and sometimes get rather unsettled in their quest for a more magical mode, but as you’d expect, like life itself it isn’t exactly linear. Threads and comments intermingle in that typical staggered time of the chatgroup, and vary just as typically between the inane and the insightful, laden with typos. A collective denouement does eventually arrive through this miasma of Situationism, paganism and pontification, but often I felt lost.
I may not be painting an attractive picture of this book, but this is the kind of disjointed discourse and perception we are all surely familiar with nowadays, whether we like it or not. Its interface with NE comes in the irruption of memorates of 1970s folk horror TV, flashbacks to early earth mysteries ideas, namechecks for people like Ithell Colquhoun, Guy Debord, Rev. Robert Kirk, the Focus Group and Shirley Collins, allusions to the Scarfolk mythos and a liberal scattering of psychogeographical asides. “In desperation to have something to be haunted by, we have got into magic”. Which probably sums up the way many of us were drawn into earth mysteries topics in the late 1960s to 70s, and have stumbled on in our quest since, seeking gems of observation amongst a general chat chaos of the virtual."
[John Billingsley]
"This is something of an oddity, spinning out of Phil Smith’s cultural history of drama, walking, occult reading and the approach he has coined in his book Mythogeography. Imagine a book club, when “some idiot suggested we read The Great God Pan … Now we’re caught up in a never-ending backstory of haunted cultural studies”, and the club gets renamed as The Guild of Shy Sorcerers. The book follows their communication in a chatgroup, as they toss around assumptions of the eerie, and sometimes get rather unsettled in their quest for a more magical mode, but as you’d expect, like life itself it isn’t exactly linear. Threads and comments intermingle in that typical staggered time of the chatgroup, and vary just as typically between the inane and the insightful, laden with typos. A collective denouement does eventually arrive through this miasma of Situationism, paganism and pontification, but often I felt lost.
I may not be painting an attractive picture of this book, but this is the kind of disjointed discourse and perception we are all surely familiar with nowadays, whether we like it or not. Its interface with NE comes in the irruption of memorates of 1970s folk horror TV, flashbacks to early earth mysteries ideas, namechecks for people like Ithell Colquhoun, Guy Debord, Rev. Robert Kirk, the Focus Group and Shirley Collins, allusions to the Scarfolk mythos and a liberal scattering of psychogeographical asides. “In desperation to have something to be haunted by, we have got into magic”. Which probably sums up the way many of us were drawn into earth mysteries topics in the late 1960s to 70s, and have stumbled on in our quest since, seeking gems of observation amongst a general chat chaos of the virtual."
[John Billingsley]